


Tear It All Asunder

by livingmountain



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Blood and Gore, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Cannibalistic Thoughts, Character Death, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Explicit Sexual Content, Horror, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, M/M, Minor Kairi/Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Murder, Serial Killers, Sexual Violence, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 11:59:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17939267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livingmountain/pseuds/livingmountain
Summary: It's a simple sort of symbiosis, what they have going: Roxas gets to kill people, and Axel gets to blow shit up. Most of the time, it works.





	Tear It All Asunder

**Author's Note:**

> Written for, and with suggestions from, the LJSM server on Discord.
> 
> In no particular order, some things that are definitely wrong with this fic:
> 
> • Emotional conflict? 100% unsolved. Probably only sporadically present.  
> • Language? Disgustingly, self-gratifyingly poetic.  
> • What even is Roxas’s personality? I sure wish I’d thought of that before I wrote an entire fic from his point of view.  
> • How do bodies even work? I don’t know. I’m a writer, not a doctor. Or, for that matter, a bank teller. What even is reality? I’ve certainly never heard of it.
> 
> This fic is gross? There is **explicit sex, explicit murder, and various references to, among other things, cannibalism, abusive and otherwise unhealthy partnerships, rape, kidnapping, pedophilia, fantastically unsafe sex, and suicidal ideation.** It also contains **bad bdsm etiquette/under-negotiated kink** , though ultimately everything remains consensual. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, this is your final warning, etc. etc.
> 
> The song Axel is listening to at the beginning of the fic, and slightly later when he’s singing in the shower, is Call Me Maybe. Just in case their being serial killers wasn’t horrifying enough.

Roxas wakes at the ass crack of dawn and is immediately, wordlessly, mind-bendingly furious; the kind of soul-deep rage that arises from far too little sleep over the course of far too many nights, drawn out and jittery. His is the spitfire animal shriek of the insomniac, one who has begged prostrate at the feet of any god who would listen and a few who wouldn’t for some sleep, any sleep, _please oh fuck oh please won’t you let me sleep_ —

And just when the blessed Sandman has finally, finally shown him mercy, like some cosmic joke he is awoken scant hours later—by the red slash of new day upon the horizon; by curtains, carelessly left cracked to usher in some semblance of a breeze; by the _inconsiderate fucking asshole singing along with the pop songs on his phone_.

With a feral growl that goes unheard by the _red-haired goddamned menace_ in his desk chair, Roxas throws off the covers and promptly smacks Axel across the back of the head, _hard._

“ _Ow_! What the _fuck_ , Rox?!” Axel yells, spinning around in the swivel chair. His earbuds have fallen out with the blow, not that it makes any difference, they’re so shitty—the tinny cascade of notes was barely any quieter when they were stoppering up Axel’s ears instead of blaring music into the open air. Snarling, Roxas grabs blindly for the neon-pink of the cord and grasps it with fumbling fingers, wraps it around them and _yanks._ Axel’s craptastic earbuds go sailing out the window, eight floors down to the sidewalk below.

They glare at each other, Axel with one hand in his hair and the other clutching white-knuckled at his phone, project on the desk behind him forgotten. Roxas is panting heavily, legs still tangled in the sheet like kelp billowing through the ocean, if kelp were cheap and old and yellow with sweat stains and smelled of cigarette smoke.

“...Good fucking morning to you too, Rox, _christ_ ,” Axel snaps, setting his phone on the desk near the coffee mug they use to hold little screwdrivers and pliers and bits of wire, when Axel isn’t dumping them all out at five in the morning like a child with a new pack of crayons.

“You were _singing_ ,” Roxas hisses at him, accusing and venomous. His head aches, his eyes ache; he hasn’t slept more than six hours in as many nights. He’d been running on caffeine and nicotine and pure spite when he’d finally been granted his reprieve, less than—he checks the clock—two and a half hours ago. His desire to throttle Axel is only very slightly outweighed by his desire to _sleep_.

He can see Axel start to snap back, to rise to the challenge—but then he lets his mouth shut with an audible _click_ , miraculously managing to hold his tongue. Roxas wonders how crazy he looks with his eyes red-rimmed and blood-shot, screaming and throwing shit out the window, that Axel shuts up now: Roxas can’t even get him to shut up when he’s wrist-deep in some stranger’s intestines; when they’re screaming and vomiting and shitting themselves and Roxas is hunched up over them with a knife and a will and a fucking _purpose_.

“Oh my god, can you hurry up already,” Axel likes to complain then, or, “ _Hahahaha_ ohmy _god_ , that’s _fantastic_ , the look on his face! That’s your colon, buddy, ever think you’d see that?” or, “Can you make sure you get it all on the tarp this time, Rox; even _I_ can’t burn dirt. I don’t make _your_ job any harder than it has to be,” like he’s not going to douse the whole place with gasoline and set a bomb off right in the middle of it; like splatter stains are still viable evidence after that. One memorable time, Axel got bored enough waiting for Roxas to force-feed a man his own tongue that he broke into a spirited rendition of _Singing in the Rain_ , miming the hat and umbrella and imaginary lantern pole as he leapt and spun around the empty packing plant like a fucking madman.

“What?” he’d asked, innocently, upon the routine’s completion, in response to Roxas’s blatant staring and distinct lack of applause. Both of them were ignoring the whimpering victim, to whom Roxas had begun feeding his own fingers when he ran out of tongue. “I was a theatre major.”

It’s a simple sort of symbiosis, what they have going: Roxas gets to kill people, and Axel gets to blow shit up. Sometimes they fuck, and most of the time, it works.

Sometimes when it doesn’t work (and sometimes when it does) Roxas imagines killing Axel. He imagines tugging fistfuls of slippery, ropy bowel loose from the cavity of Axel’s skinny torso; imagines tracing his fingers over prominent ribs before shattering them with a hammer. He imagines yanking out one leathery grey smoker’s lung and seeing how long Axel lasts gasping with just its remaining twin. He imagines Axel’s face turning purple as he suffocates, and even then, in that fantasy, between every cry of pain and every gurgling breath, Axel’s still laughing.

He comes back to himself with Axel snapping fingers in his face, not even an inch away from his nose. He goes to slap the offending hand away but Axel tugs it back before the hit connects, somehow graceful. He brings both hands up by his shoulders and both eyebrows up to his hairline as he spins around in a lazy swivel-chair circle, and Roxas is so tired he wants to rip something to shreds—maybe the pillow, maybe the sheets, maybe stupid, smirking Axel—so he can build a bloody nest out of feathers and rags and squishy guts to curl up in and _rest_. His arms feel shaky and kitten-weak and his head weighs twice as much as it should, and his vision is so blurry Axel’s hair takes up almost everything he can see.

There’s a shove to his chest, and then the world is spinning. Roxas lashes out but doesn’t quite manage to punch Axel in the face because Axel has caught his arm, and has also slipped behind him, and somehow they’re both lying on their backs amidst the cacophonous squeaking of the shitty creaky bed.

“You’re lucky I was working on your vest and not mine,” Axel says lowly, muffled into Roxas’s hair, and Roxas doesn’t even bother to try and parse that one while he’s too tired to remember how talking works. He flips over onto his front and bites Axel’s shoulder _hard_ through the fabric of his t-shirt—maybe he breaks skin, maybe he doesn’t—but all Axel gives him in exchange is a shaky and uneven exhale.

“Go the fuck to sleep, Rox, you pissy little demon,” Axel tells him, and any other night Roxas would fight him on principle—in fact he opens his mouth to do just that, furious, but he’s so fucking tired he’s out before he can even manage to get in another bite.

* * *

Roxas wakes after noon in a better mood, if only slightly. Axel isn’t in bed, but it’s not like there’s any real mystery as to where he is: within reach of the bed is the empty desk, and on the other side of the partition they’ve shoved the desk up against lies the tiny kitchenette, which is barely big enough to stand in and open the fridge door simultaneously, and is also decidedly empty. Axel is also singing, _again_ , to the accompaniment of his phone and the quiet thunder of the running shower. Roxas feels around under the bed for a shoe to throw at the bathroom door.

The shower shuts off and Axel emerges before he can find one, alas. Axel is bareass naked and dripping all over everything they collectively own, or at least everything they own located south of the bed. His bones show through his skin in the places where he lacks the muscle to hide them, which is most of them, and his chest and back and buttocks and thighs are ropy with scars, all shapes and sizes, plain straight gashes to human-jaw-shaped bite marks. His arms, too, are pockmarked with burn scars—but those ‘don’t count,’ he says, because he got them himself. The rest of the injuries were gifts from an ex, the last of which were still pink and tender over skin blooming purple with bruises when he burst his way onto the viscera-splattered crime scene that was Roxas’s life.

* * *

He first cornered Roxas at a café on the main drag, perched awkwardly in a tiny folding chair set by a round patio table. He had plopped down uninvited in the chair on the other side and announced, grandly, over an iced americano with a caramel shot, “So, I have a business proposal for you!”

Roxas hadn’t said anything, only narrowed his eyes at the skeleton of a man across the table from him, a stitch in a gash at the corner of his mouth and a couple pads of gauze taped under his eyes. If he had spoken, he probably would have asked something along the lines of, _‘Who the fuck are you?’_ or, had he been in a politer sort of mood, _‘Sorry, who the fuck are you again?’_

He didn’t actually get a chance to speak, however, which had pissed him off at the time.

“My partner,” began the man Roxas did not know was Axel, sweeping his arms in a dramatic gesture that almost overturned his coffee and smacked a passing waiter’s thigh both, though he didn’t seem to notice either, “has left me for another man! Shock! Horror! Woe! I know, you’re stunned with disbelief; it’s true, I’m quite the catch. But he was a bitch, anyways, so fucking whatever.” And then he had leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the little table, whereupon the aforementioned waiter, already incensed by the man’s loud demeanor and careless bodily conduct, had promptly stormed back out onto the patio and with little fanfare evicted him from the premises.

“Alright, alright, I’m goin’,” Axel had groused, waving the vexed waiter off. When he did, the edge of another bandage had peeked out from under his sleeve. He’d shoved a hand into his pocket and walked leisurely out into the street, and when he passed over Roxas’s head, the hand holding his iced coffee had dropped something into Roxas’s lap.

It was a note, as Roxas found out when he unrolled it--a note wrapped around one long acrylic fingernail, almond-shaped and nude, an intricate rose painted thorns and all along one side.

 _I know about the florist_ , read the note.

Roxas had had Axel shoved into an alley with a knife against his throat in thirty seconds flat.

“Speedy little thing, aren’t ya?” Axel had asked, laughing, and Roxas had let the knife bite into his neck until he drew blood but Axel hadn’t so much as flinched. “Alright, easy, easy. I took care of it, kay? Now don’t worry that pretty little head of yours.”

Roxas was not a fan of being called pretty, and he _especially_ was not a fan of being called pretty by obnoxious strangers who were attempting to blackmail him. He didn’t move from where he stood, braced with one hand fisted in Axel’s collar and the other holding him at knifepoint.

“What do you mean, you ‘took care of it’?” Roxas had asked lowly, voice and hands steady, gaze unwavering.

Axel had looked down at the knife against his neck in an exaggerated motion, eyebrows raised in a cartoonish look of incredulity, and slowly Roxas had lowered his hands until they were fisted by his sides. He didn’t step back an inch, and he was tense all over, but he wasn’t rigid—only ready, aware of every inch of space he possessed. Like something that stalked. Like something that _hunted_.

Axel grinned down at him, vicious as the slice that was dribbling blood down his neck.

“The name’s Axel,” he had said, and his hand had come up to tap his middle and index fingers ghostly-soft against Roxas’s temple. “Got it memorized? You and I, kid, I think we’re gonna be _very_ good friends.”

* * *

In the present, Axel is unbandaged and still very undressed, because the summer is scorchingly, tar-meltingly hot and because Roxas gives not even a single, solitary fuck about how much clothing Axel is wearing or not wearing at any given moment. Conveniently, neither does Axel. He’s already sweating and it mixes with the shower water on the back of his neck, under the weight of his hair, so he holds up the limp red mass of it with one hand and fans the other at the sticky skin beneath ineffectually. He stares down at a crumpled pair of bright yellow shorts on the floor as though he’s trying to remember if they belong to him or Roxas; as though Roxas would ever own such an obnoxious affront to eyeballs everywhere.

“Made you coffee,” Axel says absently, still contemplating the shorts, and Roxas looks away from him to see a half-full mug perched at the edge of the desk, contents likely still lukewarm. The mug looks like it was maybe probably-sort-of-mostly clean before coffee had been introduced to it—or at least, that’s what Roxas tells himself as he snags it and downs the entirety in a few meagre gulps, gritty sugar-sludge coating the back of his tongue and the bottom of the cup by the time he makes it to the end.

Axel is the same, sometimes, all sticky-sugar-sickly-sweet, a nauseating taste that’s made itself at home nestled deep in the crevices of Roxas’s mind and that he wants to claw out and purge—the hand resting between his shoulder blades when Axel peeks over his shoulder at the laptop screen; the bottle of shower gel that gets wordlessly replaced when Roxas has forgotten his last was emptied. Cold coffee on the mornings when he wakes up from a dead sleep, black with too much sugar, ready before he is. Waiting.

Roxas thinks of vomiting up his organs and finding Axel’s twined amongst them.

“What the hell were you working on, last night?” he asks, instead of following that train of thought. Axel makes him think, sometimes, that he might actually be full of squirming, pulsing, living things, and Roxas would rather split himself belly-open and let his entrails drip out and leave him empty.

“I told you last night,” says Axel, who has managed to put on a pair of briefs and has one leg of the little yellow shorts hooked around his ankle, but then he flops down backwards onto the bed and looks at Roxas upside-down with no intention, it seems, of pulling them up the rest of the way onto his ass. He cocks an eyebrow at Roxas, his weirdly expressive eyebrows on his weirdly expressive face, like whole thing’s made of plastic and he can pull on it with puppet strings. “I was working on your vest. Yours’ll just be a decoy, of course, but the outside may as well look as real as it can get.”

Roxas stares at him for a minute. Axel’s eyebrows, he observes, are crooked. They’re almost half-sized, because Axel singed them off once and they never quite grew back right.

Roxas doesn’t have a clue what Axel is talking about. He hasn’t been sleeping, and his memories are fuzzy—but this is Axel, so there’s only one kind of vest he could be building.

He closes his eyes and concentrates very, very hard.

Roxas remembers.

* * *

“Axel, you dumbass,” he growls, which is leagues more patiently than he is usually capable of, but he’s gotten some sleep and Axel seems _really set_ on this idea. Axel caves so often, so easygoing, so happy to follow Roxas around like an incredibly flammable puppy so long as all hell breaks loose at the end of the day that Roxas forgets, sometimes, how fucking _stubborn_ he can be when he latches onto something. “You walking absolute catastrophe, we’re not robbing a fucking bank.”

“Roxas,” coaxes Axel, putting on his best faux-reasonable tone of voice, the one that makes Roxas grit his teeth and the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end, “Roxas, we’re fucking broke.”

Roxas knows they’re fucking broke. Travelling around the country killing unsuspecting strangers and setting the remains on fire doesn’t exactly pay very well, surprise surprise, and tarps and gloves and clothes and gas and--whatever the fuck Axel buys, Roxas doesn’t know and he doesn’t really care, but bombs have to come from _somewhere_. It all has to come from _somewhere_.

Still. There are flaws in this plan, and Roxas is going to list them.

“We’re not bank robbers, Ax,” is what he says first, but Axel dismisses that with an easy shrug.

“First time for everything.”

“I’m not going to blow myself up for money,” Roxas responds flatly to the back of Axel’s head, where he’s left his hair loose since he isn’t working with any volatile chemicals at present. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m broke, so instead of getting more money to live, I’m going to go get more money and _die_.”

“You’re not going to _die_ ,” snorts Axel, squinting a bit through the thin pair of glasses he has perched on his nose. The screws he is working with are, for some unfathomable reason, incredibly fucking tiny. Roxas tastes sugar-sweet-acid-bile at the back of his throat and fights the irrational wave of anger that rises in him; Axel continues talking, oblivious: “You’re going to be wearing the decoy vest, I told you. Safe enough to dance in.”

He flicks an empty canister on the framework of the vest in question, as though to illustrate why ‘safe enough to dance in’ should be an official ranking in terms of bomb safety.

“I don’t dance,” Roxas snaps.

Axel rolls his eyes up towards the ceiling and its brown stains, spreading like moss across the pebbled expanse courtesy of their upstairs neighbour flooding his bathtub last month. They took bets--Roxas thought it was suicide, Axel figured he’d just tried to run a bath while composing high, again. Then they’d left on one of their ‘trips’ out of town and had forgotten about it by the time they’d come back.

Axel looks up at the shit-brown stains like they’re some god he can pray to for patience and Roxas imagines snatching the stupid decoy vest right out of his hands, straddling his lap and slashing him right across the eyes. The way the blood would gush and the thick, yellowish jelly of Axel’s eyeballs would slide slowly down his face, viscous as maple syrup, mixing with the iron of his blood and the salt of his tears and Roxas could drag his tongue up over the slope of his cheek, over the tattoos inked under his eyes and _lick--_

“It doesn’t matter how safe my vest is if you _blow us both up with yours_ ,” Roxas bites out, still lost in the vision of his tongue buried in Axel’s ruined eye socket, fingers clutching at the sharp line of Axel’s jaw and kissing the gory hole like a treasured lover.

“I wouldn’t blow you up, christ, I’d give you a signal or something. Grab a hostage and book it, a twenty-second head-start.”

_The Axel with the missing eyes kisses him hungrily, and Roxas tastes pink like cotton candy._

Roxas looks at the real Axel, the one sitting in the swivel chair with his hair down and those sleek little glasses perched on his long nose. The real Axel isn’t giving him a strange look, because he never gives Roxas a strange look. He isn’t smirking or glaring or making any of the many faces Roxas is used to seeing him make, either, plastic skin on puppet strings. The real Axel has a blank face on, so Roxas makes his face go blank too and stares back.

There is silence.

“...It’s Tuesday,” says Axel, turning back to the decoy vest. Roxas drags his phone out of his shorts pocket and checks. Axel’s right. Roxas calls his brother on Tuesdays.

Roxas doesn’t speak, just gets up off the bed and jams his feet in his shoes, not looking back as he walks out into the building proper. In his head, the Axel with the missing eyes is laughing.

* * *

“Roxas!” greets Sora, chipper over the phone line as ever, and Roxas leans back against the brick wall behind him and allows himself to smile because he loves his brother. He does. Just like he loves his sister, so much he cried for days when she went missing, so much he shook with rage when they brought her back and she was _different_ , she was drawn and distant and _changed_.

She’s on the Islands with Sora, now, in a long-term care facility; they both thought it would be better if they got her out of Twilight Town. Sora visits. Roxas doesn’t. He sent her a letter, once, but all the envelope contained was a necklace, a pendant on a plain silver chain: A long piece of nude acrylic, the back filed smooth and the tip coming to an almond point. Decorated, along the side, with an intricate little painting of a rose.

Naminé could paint better, Roxas is sure; Sora says she’s responded excellently to art therapy. He sends Roxas pictures of the drawings and paintings she’s made, quick snapshots taken in bad lighting with just his phone camera, but even with this lackluster presentation and his own lack of an eye for art, Roxas can tell they’re beautiful. Still, Roxas thinks, it’s the thought behind a gift that counts.

“Sora,” Roxas says, his voice as warm as he can make it, “I’m glad you picked up. How have you been?”

Sora chuckles a little sheepishly. Roxas knows Sora’s childhood friends despair of him ever answering a message in a timely fashion, never mind the way he manages to lose or break the phone itself reliably within a year. The longest one has ever survived is eight and a half months, according to Kairi; eight months and thirteen days according to Riku, who cares more about being precise. Kairi sent Roxas a picture of Sora on the phone’s eight-month ‘birthday’, the phone in his hands wearing a tiny party hat while an embarrassed Sora blew out a candle stuck in a cupcake.

“I’ve been good!” chirps Sora, who would probably say the same even if a house had fallen on him. “Kairi and Riku and I, we’re all thinking of getting a puppy! I mean, Riku wants a cat, but cats are mean, and scratch, and since we’re not all limited on space anymore now that we’re not living in an apartment, Kairi and I were thinking…”

Roxas lets his brother ramble on good-naturedly, letting the words wash over him and basking in the calm his brother’s voice gives him. Sora’s voice, somehow soothing despite his excitement, brings the important things into focus and lets the rest fade into the background.

There’s something about Sora that draws people to him, something inexorable and innate that he radiates and that people can’t help but turn towards, like flowers towards the sun. Roxas’s mind chews thoughts into sausage, all the worst bits of everything ground up over and over and forced neatly into little flesh tubes for public consumption--hot metal and meat and noise and stink churning out something you can only choke down if you don’t think too hard about where it came from. Sora soothes him, gives him his absolution. Sora leaves Roxas healed and clean.

When Roxas hangs up, after assuring Sora he’ll call Naminé (he won’t) and that dogs are definitely, hands down a better pet than cats (whatever will piss Riku off the most), he stuffs his phone in his pocket and tries to think of nothing. The longer he can think of nothing, the longer his mind feels calm and steady. The longer Roxas can think of nothing, the longer Roxas can breathe.

He shuts the door to the apartment behind him and there’s Axel, all gangly bones and skin stretched thin, box-red hair and tattoos and scars like someone tried to eat him alive. Axel who smells of burning flesh and chemical chains and cigarettes smoked leaning out an eighth-story window, just so he doesn’t blow the whole goddamned building to kingdom come; Axel who is smoke and blood and teeth bared like knives. Axel who gazed into his eyes and spoke to him low in a voice like sex, _yeah baby, do it for me, I wanna see you; I wanna see your face Rox you’re so fuckin’ beautiful_ as he held a man’s beating heat in his hand and squeezed until it stopped.

Axel, who doesn’t need him to breathe and doesn’t care if he stops because Axel was always born to combust, and if there’s any oxygen left in his lungs, he’s taking Roxas out with him.

 _Do the bank robbery yourself_ , is what he opens his mouth to say, but Axel, as always, beats him to the punch.

“Do the bank thing with me, and we’ll find someone for you, after. A twofer, okay?”

 _A twofer_. It takes Roxas a minute to understand—but that makes sense. If Axel gets to play, then so does Roxas; they’re just going in a different order, this time.

Axel’s eyes are whole in their sockets, intent and green like sour apples on the back of Roxas’s tongue. Axel’s eyes are as bright and sharp as any knife in Roxas’s collection; sharper, even, than any knife Roxas could ever hope to own.

* * *

They drive five counties over and stay the night at a motel that somehow manages to be shittier than their actual apartment. There are no less than six twitching cockroach carcasses littering the rim of the stained bathtub when they turn the bathroom lights on, and Axel camps out under the cracked mirror hanging over the lopsided sink and makes it his personal project to set each and every one on fire, timing how long it takes each little body to burn down to nothing. It isn’t easy to set a cockroach on fire, Roxas learns.

Roxas covers the bed in one of the tarps they’ve brought along for ‘cleanup’, because he wouldn’t trust the sheets if he held the cleaners at gunpoint while they ran them through the wash. And Roxas can be _very_ persuasive, at gunpoint. It isn’t very hard.

He turns on the TV and covers the tarp with a spread of fine cuisine liberated from the nearest McDonald’s, setting up a grimy little caricature of a picnic. They spend the evening making fun of the local news and munching on chicken nuggets, ashing their cigarettes in the watery dregs of Axel’s coke. When Axel’s done playing with bugs (“Disgusting,” declares Roxas, and Axel rolls his eyes and snarks back, “Yeah, god, so gross; why couldn’t I just go and find a nice clean human body to turn into my personal sandbox?”) they push the cardboard chicken boxes and crumpled burger wrappers off the bed and onto the floor, and then they fuck on the tarp, to a symphony of shrieking bedsprings and crackly plastic and their neighbours in the room next door pounding on the wall, bellowing at them to _shut the fuck up already_. Roxas plays it up and screams as loud as he can as Axel pounds him into the mattress, the bed thumping against the wall hard enough that the whole room shudders, and Roxas tips his head back and _howls_ when he comes and Axel bites into his neck to smother his grunt and inelegant, snorting laughter.

Axel sleeps, snoring. Roxas doesn’t.

The next morning, Roxas sprays the tarp down with sanitizer and wrestles it back into its packaging while Axel smudges thick concealer over his tattoos, swears at the mirror and tries to stuff all his hair under a black knit cap. They both have oversized black hoodies and matching gloves and sunglasses, and Roxas has a hat, too, but his hair isn’t the colour of a fucking fire engine, so it’s less of a hassle to jam it on his head. They each have a black cotton hygienic mask, a flea market find on Axel’s part. Roxas’s is emblazoned with the emblem of a boy band. Axel’s has a panda wearing a little pink bow.

They drive another two counties south and stash the car in the parking lot of an abandoned mall.

“This is the most reckless thing we’ve ever done,” says Roxas. “We’re going to get caught. And if we don’t get caught, we’re going to die of heat stroke. And if we don’t die of heat stroke, I’m definitely going to kill you.”

“Aww, Rox,” Axel croons at him giddily, wearing all black in ninety-degree weather and strapping himself into an explosive vest, “You always say the sweetest things.”

* * *

They rob a bank. It goes spectacularly.

High on adrenaline and unfamiliar nerves, it passes in a blur for Roxas—getting inside, unzipping their hoodies, the shocked gasps and screams from the few tellers and clientele that Roxas tunes out with ease. He shoots a man in the knee when the fucker won’t put his phone away, and luck is on his side so the shot goes clean through. Roxas ignores the screaming man and keeps his gun trained on the tellers, leaving Axel to take care of the theatrics while he goes searching for the bullet. Not that the gun is registered, if their weapons dealer wants to keep his remaining eye, but better safe than sorry.

“ _Ladies and gentlemen_!” Axel booms, voice projecting with ridiculous finesse while he holds up the bomb trigger, “Come now, I think we all know what’s going on here! But there’s no cause for alarm! Let’s all just keep our hands where we can see them and we’ll all walk out of here alive--except for that poor fuck, I guess, he’s not gonna be walking anywhere.” His sweater gapes open to reveal the heavy framework of the bomb snuggled around his torso, the bulk of it jutting out impudently from where it’s cradled all close between the xylophone of his ribs. Like he’s pregnant with the firepower to blow the whole bank into little chunks of brick and flesh.

Then Roxas spots her.

One of the tellers, a blonde with a flat look on her face as she stuffs cash into the pillowcases Axel holds out to her. Roxas has an arm around her waist and his gun to her temple before he knows what he’s doing, and she gasps, fingers with their long, black nails fisting in the cheap cotton, the motherlode of all Halloween sacks.

“She’s coming with us,” Roxas mutters, just loud enough for Axel to hear, and Axel shrugs and snatches the pillowcase from her perfectly-manicured hands to heft it over his shoulder. Roxas nabs the other and prods the blonde into moving by pushing the gun into the small of her back.

“See, now, wasn’t that nice and painless?” Axel enquires of the room at large. He gives the trigger in his free hand a showy toss, and one of the cowering patrons whimpers. “We’re going to leave now, and let’s be clear--I hear sirens, and blondie here gets it.”

A jab to the back, and Roxas gets their hostage walking. Axels stops on their way out to lean down and speak to the man with the bleeding knee.

“You might want to get someone to take a look at that,” he imparts, kindly, like it’s some sort of well-kept secret, and he squeezes the man’s shoulder like a deeply concerned friend. The man’s face is pale from fear and blood loss, and his eyes are wide and glassy with terror.

“Fucking showboat,” Roxas mutters, as they follow the blonde to her car and toss the pillowcases in the trunk.

“Theatre major, darling,” Axel corrects, and he leans over the back of the front seat to where the blonde sits with her grip white on the steering wheel, pulling down his mask with the stupid panda in its stupid pink bow. His crazy smirk takes up the whole of his elastic fucking face and his eyes are sparking like manic stars as he commands her, “ _Drive, sister, drive_.”

* * *

By some miracle, they actually don’t hear sirens on their drive back to the mall parking lot. Neither is there any other sign of pursuit. Roxas’s heart’s still pounding jackrabbit-fast in his chest as they unload their cargo into their own four-wheeled junk heap—a far cry from the sleek new car the blonde apparently owns—and stuff their disguises into the trunk, Axel shaking his hair free of the knit cap with a sigh of relief.

When the blonde speaks up, her voice is steady.

“You got what she wanted,” she says, and she looks evenly at both of them, her only tell the very slightest trembling of her hands. “Now aren’t you going to let me go?”

Roxas gazes at her, face impassive, arms crossed across the unimpressive width of his chest.

“Let you go?” echoes Axel, sounding genuinely incredulous. “Why the fuck would we do that?”

So of course the bitch screws up her face and starts to yell for help, and then Roxas has to go through all the trouble of shoving her head-over-pointy-heels and cracking her head on the asphalt hard enough that she passes out, which is luckily a skill he has put time and effort into developing. He kicks her in the head a couple times just to be sure she’s good and out of it, and then he zipties her hands and ankles and lugs her into the back seat of the car, which has been neatly prepped with a tarp covering the seat where she’s going to sit. He folds half the tarp over her once she’s seated, so she won’t get any evidence on the window and door, and then he goes around the other side of the car and takes the seat beside her, buckling in and setting the gun on his lap.

Almost as an afterthought, he fishes a roll of duct tape out of the door well and presses a piece of it firmly over her mouth, and then covers her head with the last of the pillowcases. It’s an especially flammable one, or at least, it’s one that especially deserves to be burned. It’s the one Axel threw up on when he caught the flu from Roxas last December, and no amount of visits to the laundromat since have managed to rid Roxas of the associated repulsion.

“Are you quite finished, Princess Perfect?” Axel demands testily, eyeing Roxas through the rearview mirror and drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “You’re the one who was so worried about getting caught, let’s fuckin’ scram before we _get fucking caught_.”

“I’m done,” Roxas agrees, instead of snapping, _No use if we get caught with her DNA in here later,_ or, _Hey, you could have been driving while I gagged her, asshole._

Axel shoots him an unreadable glance, eyes darting towards him once more in the mirror, but Roxas doesn’t say anything more, and neither does he. After only a second Axel puts the car into drive, gives it just a little bit of gas, and they go.

Roxas sits in the back seat with the gun on his lap, his hands folded neatly across its grip. His mind is clear. His thoughts are focussed.

Roxas breathes.

* * *

The blonde wakes up well after Roxas has finished zip-tying her wrists and ankles separately, one to each leg of the little chair he’s crammed her into. He’s poking at the little fire Axel got going in one corner, under the only vent in the place, when he hears a telltale rustle of cloth—he gets up and crouches in front of her, staring into her face as she stirs.

She groans, tugging at her arms and legs—finding them bound, she jerks her head up. She only seems to notice Roxas in passing as her gaze snaps this way and that, taking in her surroundings; as she struggles against the plastic biting into her skin, a snarl growing on her face.

“Naminé, you little _bitch_!” she roars, disoriented and furious, and Roxas’s vision nearly blurs with rage as he leans forward and delivers her a stunning backhand across the face.

The woman is stunned silent with pain for a moment. Axel whistles, low under his breath, but Roxas doesn’t hear him over the sound of the blood pounding in his ears.

The woman blinks, slowly licking blood from the new split in her lip. Roxas waits.

“...You’re not Naminé,” the woman says, her eyes finally focussing on his face proper.

“No, Larxene,” answers Roxas. To his own ears his voice sounds distant, too ephemeral to exist. “No, I’m not.”

Roxas stands. Despite his short stature, he stands taller than Larxene by virtue of the chair she sits in, bolted to the ground and sized for a child. The room is white and bare, with a naked cot—also bolted down—shoved in one corner, and a brightly-coloured toddler’s toilet left abandoned in another. Larxene can’t see the latter, since the chair she’s tied to faces the opposite wall, but she can probably see the cot if she cranes her neck around. Which she doesn’t. She knows exactly where she is.

“...How did you find this place?” she finally asks. It’s hard to tell what inflection her voice holds: not quite surprise, not exactly resignation, not even really curiosity. Roxas ruminates on this, memorizing the details of her expressionless face: big blue eyes, sharp white teeth, a pointed little chin. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine her with cruel glee in her eyes and a sadistic smirk on her face, despite her stoic exterior. Or perhaps not so surprisingly, knowing as Roxas does what that pretty face is capable of.

Roxas doesn’t answer. The silence drags out between them for what to Roxas feels like hours, and he grounds himself in it. This is his moment.

He stands, making his way back to where Axel is poking at the little fire going on cot, the contents of Larxene’s wallet strewn haphazardly around him. Axel is watching Roxas intently, green eyes as bright as any flame he’s ever lit. He doesn’t say anything while Roxas grabs the pair of blades he’s left heating in the fire, glad for the thickness of the work gloves covering his hands.

Pride, or perhaps genuine disinterest, means that Larxene hasn’t turned her head to try and keep Roxas in her line of sight. She isn’t looking back as Roxas comes up behind her, and that makes it almost too easy to take the glowing-hot knives and drive them, sure and swift, deep into her eyes.

Larxene screams.

It isn’t a movie sound, no high-pitched feminine recording of a shriek—it’s raw and animal, ear-splitting and wrenched from somewhere soul-deep. She writhes and bucks in a mad struggle, howling wildly with all her teeth bared, while Roxas holds the knives in place and breathes in the smell of scorching flesh and blood. When he starts to twist the knives, he thinks he hears the snap of something in her wrist giving way, she’s pulling so hard against her restraints. He leans down so he can answer her earlier question, though he doubts she’s listening now.

“I knew there had to be a place like this somewhere,” he tells her, finally sliding the knives free of the pulpy mess of cooked meat and shredded sclera that five minutes ago were her eyes, “I knew you had to have been keeping her _somewhere._ And when I didn’t find it in his house—no keys, no locked rooms, no hidden doors—I was almost certain I had the wrong guy. But then I remembered _you._ ”

He punctuates the last part by driving the knives into her shoulders, one at a time, putting his weight into it with a grunt of exertion. Larxene is still screaming, though hoarser, now; she gurgles and chokes on the blood that’s running down her face and into her open mouth, soaking her hair and filling her ears besides. Roxas has to work fast, he knows—as much as the part of him that isn’t blissfully focussed and frozen seethes and spits and yowls, yearning to drag it out, rip into her with claws, flay her open with nothing but his teeth and nails and rage and make it last for _years_ —she’ll die of shock or blood loss before he can make her suffer even a fraction of the agony she deserves. The cold, resolute part of him is more than happy to settle with making sure her last few moments _count_.

The knives cut through a decent chunk of meat and cartilage, lodging themselves a respectable ways into the bone. He pulls them back and uses one to cut through the zip tie binding one wrist to a chair leg. It’s easy to catch her arm once it’s free, since all she can do is flail it at him (literally) blindly.

He holds her wrist in both hands, leaning down to speak closer to her ear. He has to raise his voice to be heard over her jagged breaths.

“The key to the storage unit was pretty obvious, when we found it,” he tells her. She isn’t screaming, for the moment, just gasping desperately for air, but Roxas isn’t going to gag her. They both know the unit’s been soundproofed. “You even kept it on your key ring. I was just going to take you back to your house, but come on, this was way too perfect. Finding you, finding this place—it must be my lucky day.”

She snarls at him again, her mouth twisted out of its pretty bow into something ugly and vile, and maybe she’s about to say something? Roxas doesn’t give her the chance. He pulls her arm up over her head, then further back, bracing himself and putting all his weight into it—and then he _heaves_ , forcing her arm back and down towards the floor with the grinding, hollow _snap_ of joints popping lose from their sockets. Roxas grits his teeth, digs his gloved fingers into the snowy flesh of her now-useless arm, and gives another full-body _yank_.

Larxene isn’t screaming, anymore—Roxas was curious, in the part of himself that remembers things like _curious,_ if she would manage it, or if she would eventually go mute and broken with pain. He drops the arm that once belonged to her, now attached only by some stubborn, grisly ribbons of muscle, floppy and no more significant than a rotisserie chicken wing. Blood coats everything: the chair, the floor, his clothes and hers; it gushes freely from the new hollow in her side and meanders more sluggishly down her face and neck, wounds partially cauterized. It forms shallow, sticky pools in the hollows of her collar bones and trickles down obscenely into the valley between her breasts.

He thinks, momentarily, of his childhood—how easy it was, when he was angry, to snap the limbs off of Naminé’s Barbies. How little thought it required. The wave of nostalgia that washes over him is so intense it almost makes him sick.

Larxene is very pale, when he looks at her, her pallor almost waxen. She’s lost a lot of blood, he thinks; he shouldn’t be surprised. He has to move quickly, but he finds himself caught staring a moment longer.

“Why did you keep it?” he hears himself ask, without permission. His voice sounds distant, no longer flat but almost… childish. A little lost. “The key to this place. Why did you leave it the same?”

Larxene, chest heaving with the effort of every breath, bares bloody teeth at him in one last act of defiance. The lost feeling is swept away on a rush of fury so red-hot it comes round the other side and leaves him numb. His mind goes clear as still water, clear as diamond, and when he slashes the zip tie holding her remaining wrist captive, this time she’s too far gone to struggle.

“Did you love him?” he asks her, voice once again cold and impenetrable. “Did you? It’s a pity you were too old to be his type.”

Flexing his fingers in blood-tacky gloves, he tightens his grip. He settles his stance.

Roxas breathes.

* * *

Someone is shaking him, and he turns on them like a rabid beast, fingers hooked into claws and every white tooth in his mouth on primal display. He lands a wild blow with his arm before he registers what they’re saying:

“Rox, _Roxas_ , she’s dead—calm your _fucking tits_ , can you hear me, you crazy son of a bitch, she’s _dead_!”

 _Axel_. Roxas stares at him wildly, taking in how his arms and chest are covered with rusty, half-dried blood, proof of a struggle Roxas doesn’t quite recall through the intoxicating haze of incandescent fury thrumming through his every cell. When he whips his head around to get a look at his true victim, he sees Larxene’s corpse dropped into an inelegant, eerie sprawl, still secured by stilettoed ankles to the little children’s chair. Both arms, all but severed, hang grotesquely at her sides, leaving her silhouette looking elongated and inhuman. Her ruined face is purple with the remaining blood in her body, and this combined with the pair of bloody handprints collaring her throat are evidence of a stranglehold Roxas doesn’t quite remember imparting, but that he isn’t disinclined to believe was his doing.

His body thrums with nerves and anger and adrenaline, a vicious mix he wants to force out of his system by shattering bones and rending quivering flesh from decimated skeleton. Death is a siren song to the meat factory in his head and the beast in his chest, and they scream at him to _destroy_.

He yanks his gloves off, shoves Axel up against the wall, and kisses him hard enough to taste blood—whose, he doesn’t know, and he certainly doesn’t care. Axel kisses him back. Axel always kisses back, even when Roxas is covered head to toe with someone else’s blood and guts, a corpse on the floor and a live bomb in one corner; even, apparently, when Roxas has just committed violent, bloody murder in the cell where his little sister was kept prisoner for years.

Roxas fists a hand in Axel’s hair, hard enough that it has to hurt, and rakes his nails down the scarred expanse of Axel’s bare chest, hoodie long since abandoned to the heat of the summer. Axel groans into his mouth even as Roxas draws blood, back arching away from the wall and into Roxas’s touch. Roxas yanks again on his handful of hair, hard, and Axel hisses in pain and pleasure and stumbles a little under the force of it.

Roxas shoves him down to his knees—Axel is taller, but he’s built like a scarecrow, and Roxas has worked hard to pack as much muscle as he can on his own lean frame—and uses his free hand to squeeze Axel’s jaw in a punishing grip, thumb digging hard into the soft place near the hinge of it until Axel lets his mouth fall open obediently. He groans, head jerking away from the pain instinctively, but he doesn’t otherwise resist, and his eyelids flutter a bit when Roxas pulls his hand back to undo his own jeans, pulling his cock out of his boxers in a few quick movements.

Axel hasn’t closed his mouth, so it’s easy for Roxas to force him down by the hand in his hair and slide into his throat, hips jerking rough and selfish into the slick heat of it. Axel chokes and gags against the head of him, which only makes Roxas let out a low, inhuman sort of noise and buck his hips with more purpose, fucking the wet clench of Axel’s spasming throat. Soon enough there's a slick layer of drool coating Axel’s chin, threatening to begin to drip onto his chest, but he doesn’t move to wipe it; doesn’t move at all except to try and close his lips around Roxas properly and suck. His eyes are watering, and when the tears spill over Roxas slows his animal thrusting to smear them away, mostly only succeeding in smudging blood over Axel’s stupid tattoos, left to match the rusty fingerprints now littering his jaw.

Axel starts using what breath he has to groan, filthy and loud, around Roxas’s cock, and it takes Roxas a moment to realize that it’s because he’s gripping himself roughly through the denim of his jeans, hips jumping up into his own touch. Roxas snarls wordlessly at him and drags himself back, using the grip on Axel’s hair to pull him further away from the wall and throw him to the ground.

He sprawls there beside Larxene’s corpse, coughing for breath, elbows slipping in the pool of congealing blood as he tries to prop himself up. Roxas is on him a second later, working Axel’s jeans open. He all but rips them off Axel’s body—one leg gets caught on Axel’s boot and it doesn’t matter, he leaves it; the manic, wordlessly possessive need that grips him drives him to lean up and sink his teeth into Axel’s shoulder, hard enough to draw blood. Axel starts swearing loudly and only gets louder when Roxas works two and then three fingers into him, wet only with strings of blood and saliva. Neither of those will last long but Axel’s chanting one long mantra of his name and various obscenities, over and over, and the word ‘no’ certainly doesn’t feature, so Roxas doesn’t stop.

He pushes Axel’s legs open until one knobbly knee knocks against the metal leg of the chair, licks his palm and fists Axel’s cock in a rough grip and Axel moans wildly, rocking onto the fingers buried awkwardly inside him and panting, “Rox, Roxas, _nng_ , fuck—Roxas, give it to me fuck give it to me _Roxas fuck me right now I swear to god—_ ”

So Roxas does, shoves his way into Axel’s body in short, inelegant thrusts while Axel digs his fingernails into Roxas’s biceps and pants through bared teeth, the way Larxene dragged in her last few breaths, vicious seething defiance. Axel holds his gaze and his expression takes on that exact same savage, unconscious twist and Axel’s eyes flash as Roxas stares back into them, empty-socket red to toxic-waste green, back and forth from hole to whole, red green red green _red green redgreenredgreen--_

And Roxas comes, hard.

* * *

They leave.

They wipe themselves down as best they can with the alcohol wipes in Roxas’s (Axel-christened) Murder Kit, a backpack wrapped in one of the ever-helpful plastic tarps. They pile everything they’ve touched in the middle of the room, even their shoes and clothes, and they change into clean outfits before Axel takes his bomb vest and picks his way back to place it lovingly in the center of the evidence pile, right beside Larxene. Her body lies tipped half-out of the little chair, dislocated limbs at inhuman angles, broken-doll floppy. They can’t risk pouring gasoline over anything with a fire already going, but the space is small and, save the metal framework of the furniture, the things in it flammable, so they lock the door behind them and wait til they’re a safe distance away before Axel hits the trigger.

(Roxas definitely doesn’t memorize way his face lights up ( _ha, lights up_ ) in nothing short of radiant _rapture_ when the bomb goes off, deafening at such close range.)

They drive back to their shitty apartment, considerably richer upon their return than their departure. It storms that night and they fuck with the windows wide open, curtains flapping around them in the wind like massive, demented bats. Rain pelts them, soaks through the sheets and everything else left at the mercy of the elements, and the lightning shatters Axel’s plasticine face into nothing but sharp, dramatic angles, twisted up in ecstasy unrecognizable from agony. They aren’t quiet, and the next morning they find that the neighbours have complained.

Life goes on. Days pass with no calls or visits from the police, and as the anxious edge of uncertainty wears off the way it always does they settle back into routine—Roxas doesn’t sleep for three nights straight; Axel keeps the lights on all night and dances around in his underwear singing Broadway show tunes at three in the morning, and Roxas retaliates by attempting to stab him in the kidneys, repeatedly. The neighbors complain more, to no-one’s surprise.

Roxas calls his brother and tells him he’s doing well. He listens to the escapades of the newly-dubbed Riku-the-puppy and delights, internally, in the newfound joy that is referring to Riku-the-human as Riku-the-human. He sends Naminé a pair of earrings, long dangling teardrops of shiny black acrylic. He writes her a short note, promising he’ll visit soon.

Axel sets off a firework in the kitchen that nearly levels the entire block, given the kitchen’s proximity to Axel’s collection of highly volatile chemicals. In the ensuing fit of rage, Roxas throws everything of Axel’s he can get his hands on out of the apartment window, up to and including the pair of tiny yellow shorts, the coffee mug full of screwdrivers, and Axel’s brand-new Bluetooth earbuds. The next morning, they find out they’re being evicted.

(For, their irate landlord informs them frostily, a variety of transgressions, but most pressingly their ‘lackadaisical notions of safety surrounding explosive substances, and their baffling and wretchedly persistent penchant for flinging their belongings out of eighth-story windows, like a pair of _fucking lunatics_.’ They figure that’s fair.)

Roxas helps Axel stuff their remaining belongings in the backseat of their incredibly shitty car. The trunk has been allocated to Axel’s collection of proponents of things that go boom, which had been spared Roxas-induced defenestration by virtue of Roxas possessing some measure of common sense, and lacking an overt death wish. Riding around in a tin can powered by small explosions, which is carrying within it a fantastic selection of chemicals primarily used to create _bigger_ and _better_ explosions is, therefore, a concept he finds both mildly and (if he does say so) reasonably alarming, but when he brings this up, Axel just grins at him with too many teeth and asks, “Come on, Rox, where’s your sense of adventure?” Roxas is forced to concede that this is hardly the first time he’s played fast and loose with his own well-being, and so he gets in the car.

(Privately, he spares a moment to snicker at the comment about adventure, since Axel is paradoxically the safest driver he knows—reckless speeding being a habit he gave up when he moved on to more exciting crimes like murder and arson, in the interests of keeping his face and fingerprints out of police records.)

Axel climbs into the driver’s seat and catches Roxas smirking to himself, so of course he asks, “What the hell are you laughing at?”

“You,” Roxas tells him honestly, and Axel rolls his eyes in response.

“You’re in a good mood,” he remarks, and before Roxas can respond, _Maybe I am,_ Axel catches his hand and says, seriously, “Rox. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

Roxas’s everything goes cold. Something sugar-sweet and sickly, laughing through blood bubbles, twines itself slick and sinuous low in his gut. Axel holds his gaze with acid-green eyes.

Roxas holds his breath.

“I’ve always wanted,” starts Axel, voice trembling with hope and the intensity of emotion, “to blow up an amusement park.”

Roxas feels his heart judder to a stop in his chest.

“Probably,” he tries, and then he has to stop to wet his lips. His voice comes out a little choked up when he continues, choosing his words deliberately: “we should start with a roller coaster, first.”

And Axel gasps, softly, a breathless sound of utter delight. The grin spreading across his face is beatific. It is dawn breaking, and clouds parting; it is the pure, wondrous joy of a child discovering the magic of Christmas morning.

“Rox,” Axel tells him as he puts the car in gear, looking at Roxas soulfully, like he might actually be God, “You always say the sweetest things.”

And Roxas can’t help it: he laughs.


End file.
